And is there an overlap or a mismatch between who makes that decision for an individual and who *should* make that decision?
The decision should be made by the student and no one else! If the parents can't afford the costs, the student has to find a way to pay for it, if his goal is really that important to him. I did that when I wanted to do graduate work in a field outside my major, and knew that I needed an extra year of classes in order to qualify.
And does a teacher's decision to not encourage her students, in general, to attend college have every bit as much impact as deciding to encourage all of them?
Hmm...from this and other posts, it seems that you're defaulting to encouraging everyone to go to college and that not going is somehow carries a stigma. College should really only be a target for, at most, about a quarter of the population (but probably more like 20% or less).
Unless your students are a lot more capable than people on average in the rest of the world, most of them aren't capable of getting a traditional college education. Encouraging them to go as a general rule is, IMO, lying to them and is cruel for reasons I laid out in previous messages. But here are more reasons:
Our society has been encouraging too many people to go to college for too long. One result of this is a proliferation of watered-down programs that don't require a lot of reading and writing, among other things. The effects are showing --- there's a national discussion around the so-called college bubble, and a big recent study found that many college grads didn't learn much while they were in school. For example,
here's a summary of a report called
Academically Adrift.
I spent a three years as an adjunct at a community college and work with college-aged people now. Too many of them check off their "gen ed" requirements as a laundry list of stuff to get out of the way. They're very matter-of-fact about it and don't seem especially interested in biology or philosophy or history or whatever. I don't get a sense of the joy of learning from them. The gen ed classes are just another hurdle to clear. I'm not dumping on the students here: I'm criticizing a system that tells them to go to college without considering whether or not college is actually the best option for them.
And as
Austin pointed out earlier today, they're yoked to their student loans for life. Read the article in
The Atlantic that he found.
I'd very much like to know why you encourage all or most of your students to go to college.
